Film Openings: DramaJoshua Crichlow

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The opening is very vague in terms of the story: the entire thing is an ambiguous metaphor. Most noticeably, the main characteristic is the flowing black liquid (it looks like ink, however it could also be petrol). It’s everywhere, uncontrolled and coming into contact with lots of different things – it is shown to drown a screaming man, flow through the keys on a keyboard, and drench a person’s head, for example. The common aspect of the imagery is death. At one point, the liquid is set on fire, and we are shown the image of a flaming bird of some sort, most likely a phoenix. After this image is shown, life begins to emerge, and the people in the dark begin to die, one after another.

Black SwanThe opening of Black Swan is very mysterious, since it only shows black pastel being used on a page. In this opening sequence, it initially starts off as a very calm opening, but as the music picks up, so does the speed of the drawing, and also the ferocity of it, shown in the fact that the pastel breaks, over and over again, until finally, at the end, we hear the smashing of glass, and are shown the finished drawing of a black swan. The scene could be seen as a metaphor for the swan, which has caused much damage just by coming into creation.

The Social Network

At the very beginning of the film, Mark is dumped by his girlfriend Erica – unlike other films, this one starts off with a seemingly irrelevant scene. Instead of using metaphors, the character of Mark is shown to be very precise and pedantic, to the point where he is annoyed with a vague phrase said in context. This results in his girlfriend leaving him on the spot, and thus begins the story with a relatively commonplace event. Instead of trying to create a tense atmosphere, the first scene simply introduces the characters.